Policing, Culture and Community: Effecting Change through the Arts
Policing, Culture and Community is a place-based interdisciplinary body of work that uses arts and performance-based methodologies to interrogate contemporary challenges around police-community engagement with seldom-heard communities. Partners are collaborators and also co-creators in many instances.
Our research explores the potentials and challenges afforded by arts and culture in the context of a widespread crisis in police legitimacy and in light of the damaged relationships between police and some communities.
We approach this object of study through two lenses: firstly, we look at the opportunities arts-based interventions might offer as a medium for police-community engagement. And secondly, we explore the possibilities afforded by the arts for effecting broader change in police practice - through innovative approaches to police training and by enabling young people to communicate their lived experiences of policing on their own terms, in ways that can be presented to police actors and decision-makers. In 2023, our co-commissioned play, After Preston, was performed to police & young people as part of this work.
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This project is led by:
Professor Jacqueline HodgsonLink opens in a new window is Professor of Law and co-director of COPRLink opens in a new window at the University of Warwick. Her work focuses on how the criminal justice process operates in practice in the UK and Europe, using empirical, comparative and interdisciplinary methods.
Dr Rachel Lewis is a Teaching Fellow in the Sociology Department at Warwick University. She works at the intersections between Law, Sociology, and Applied Linguistics, and focuses on issues around bordering, anxiety, and punishment in the contemporary UK.
Follow us: @PoliceartsLink opens in a new window
Our collaborators:
The Belgrade Theatre
Amahra Spence
Jen Davis
Joe Rose
Yasmin Dawes
Jay Zorenti-Nakhid
Kieren Hamilton-Amos
Cory Weekes
West Midlands Police
Local Coventry & Birmingham schools
